[Haskell-cafe] [haskell.org Google Summer of Code 2013] Approved Projects

[Dominic Steinitz]

Hi Edward,

Thanks for this comprehensive answer (and also thanks to participants in the follow-up dissuasion).

How is the "public good" determined? (sounds rather Benthamite). I would have been disappointed if "charts using diagrams" had not been selected yet I don't recall being canvassed.

Sorry to sound picky. I think from what you say that in this particular year it was obvious which projects should be selected; in future it may not be. I think an acceptable reason would be "there was only one user who wanted it". Maybe we should use something like: https://www.uservoice.com. Sadly it seems this requires payment but there may be a free equivalent

Dominic Steinitz
dominic at steinitz.org
http://idontgetoutmuch.wordpress.com

On 28 May 2013, at 16:11, Edward Kmett <ekmett at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Dominic,
> 
> The proposal is admittedly rather unfortunately opaque.
> 
> The parts I can shed light on:
> 
> Students come up with proposals with the help of the community and then submit them to google-melange.com.
> 
> A bunch of folks from the haskell community sign up as potential mentors, vote on and discuss the proposals. (We had ~25 candidate mentors and ~20 proposals this year).
> 
> The student application template contains a number of desirable criteria for a successful summer of code application, which is shown on the google-melange website under our organization -- an old version is available http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/summer-of-code/wiki/StudApply2012 contains 
> 
> Once we have the proposals in hand, and some initial ranking, we ask google for slots. Allocation is based on past performance, arcane community parameters that only they know, mentor ratio, etc. This should be our largest year in the program, despite the fact that in general organizations have been getting fewer slots as more organizations join, so we're apparently doing rather well.
> 
> In general we do try to select projects that maximize the public good. Most of the time this can almost be done by just straight cut off based on the average score. There is some special casing for duplicate applications between different students and where students have submitted multiple applications we can have some flexibility in how to apply them.
> 
> This year we also received an extra couple of special-purpose darcs slots from Google in exchange for continuing to act as an umbrella organization over darcs at the request of the administrator of the program at Google. In previous years I had requested an extra slot for them, this year the request came in the other direction.
> 
> We do inevitably get more good proposals than we get slots. This year we could have easily used another 3-4 slots to good effect.
> 
> The main part I can't shed light on:
> 
> Google requests that the final vote tallies remain private. This is done so that students who put in proposals to a high volume orgs and don't get accepted, or who are new to the process and don't quite catch all the rules, don't wind up with any sort of publicly visible black mark. This unfortunately means, that we can't really show the unaccepted proposals with information about how to avoid getting your proposal rejected.
> 
> I hope that helps. If you have any more questions or if my answer didn't suffice please feel free to follow up!
> 
> -Edward Kmett
> 
> 
> 
> On Tue, May 28, 2013 at 6:52 AM, Dominic Steinitz <dominic at steinitz.org> wrote:
> Hi Edward,
> 
> Although the project I am interested in (as a user) has been accepted :-), I can't help feeling the selection process is a bit opaque. Is it documented somewhere and I just missed it? Apologies if I did.
> 
> BTW I appreciate all the hard work that goes into the selection process.
> 
> Dominic Steinitz
> dominic at steinitz.org
> http://idontgetoutmuch.wordpress.com
> 
> 

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